Thoughts of a nerdy feminist

I wasn't sure how to review this book.  I don't read much non-fiction, and I read this one because, with certain events happening in my personal life, numerous people told me I needed to read this book.

It was incredibly informative.  The biggest thing I took away from it was probably in the very first chapter.  Intuition is not woo-woo.  It is your awareness of warning signs around you, things that you haven't stopped to think about yet.  He points out that we do this all the time.  In traffic, you often can tell when another car is preparing to cut you off.  This is definitely true for me.  There are signs, and we need to learn to trust this.

A lot of what was discussed frustrated and frightened me more, making me question the decisions I made in my own situation.  Particularly upsetting was his talk about just how often Restraining Orders actually provoke the person one is afraid of, rather than protect the victim.  They do work some of the time.  I don't know if my own decision was the right one, after having read this.  I might have hesitated longer if I'd read this earlier.  I'm second guessing a lot of the choices I made.

Still, it was comforting reading just how rarely death threats are carried out.  While that is not reason to disregard them, it helps to know this.

So, my advice is read this, while you don't have anything frightening happening in your life.  Be aware of the information in here in advance, so that you're informed if you should ever need it.  I suspect that everyone has at least some incident in their life in which you fear you're in real danger.  Better to understand what's said in here now than to question everything you've done, after the fact.